Letters From Flavortown: The Gospel According To Guy Fieri

I love you, Guy Fieri.

I hate you, Guy Fieri.

I’ll explain.

* * *

You probably know, but in case you don’t, Guy Fieri is the creature who ate the Food Network. He won one of the network’s reality shows (WHO WANTS TO BE THE LEAD SINGER OF SMASHMOUTH AND ALSO EAT FOOD ON TV I GUESS), and since then has slowly, like a swelling amoebic infection, taken over the entirety of the channel. I don’t know where he came from. I cannot speak to his origin story for it has never been told. I like to imagine that he sprung fully formed when one day, in the small hamlet of Flavortown, a radioactive taco truck crashed into Motley Crue’s tourbus and the resultant explosion set fire to the town’s Axe Body Spray factory. From the cataclysm, the Juggalo Prime Kaiju known as Guy Fieri (pronounced Guy Fee-Eddy) arose in a hot geyser of donkey sauce and surfed his way to the Food Network building in New York City. And the rest is a plate of grease-spattered destiny.

Guy Fieri (pronounced Gee Fai-oody) has like, seventy shows on the Food Network, though they may also all just be pseudopods of the same animal. Many of these shows are reality shows where human beings compete for his adoration and affection, I think, I honestly don’t know what’s going on there. Last time I turned on Guy’s Grocery Games, I saw people racing around grocery store aisles, leaving behind smears of blood and sriracha sauce on the white tile as they sliced into each other with plastic knives, snarling over the last package of ramen. Meanwhile, Guy Fieri (pronounced Gorb Forby) sat back on his pallet-made dais like a Hutt-slug whose frosted tips are lubricated with duck fat and whose rubbery biceps are inked with fake tribal tattoos. I tuned out after that, but I do remember a lot of rad guitar licks and jets of flame and sizzling viscera.

Of course, his flagship show is Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, which has defied the actual time-space continuum by somehow having more seasons than The Simpsons. I bought an old postcard from 1870s Philadelphia, and in it you can see Guy Fieri (pronounced Gabbalek Fernody) seductively licking a soft pretzel from a ragged orphan’s pretzel stand. In the so-called Triple-D, our cherub-cheeked antihero travels the country and occasionally the galaxy, visiting various un-fancy restaurants where he sits in the kitchen, telling cooks what they’re doing as they do it before finally sampling their wares messily in some egregious food bukkake that leaves him covered in ranch dressing and spackled with strips of pork belly. If it’s a sandwich he’s eating, he inverts it, picking it up from underneath and then flipping it toward his maw as if he is an alien creature who has yet to learn our Human Sandwich Eating Ways. He hunkers down. He eats. Then he makes word-like noises about that food, telling us about its complexity and its flavor profile before ultimately fist-bumping the cook into fame and fortune. And that’s a real thing, by the way — those restaurants Guy Fieri (pronounced Gordon Freeburg) blesses with his papal-like presence end up doing pretty damn good after the fact. This is the so-called “Fieri Effect,” which sounds like a symptom of airborne syphilis but is really the bump restaurants get from appearing on the Food Pope’s show.

He is also a restaurateur, though I’m sure he’d prefer a cooler, radder, gnarlier title like FOOD BRO or SHOGUN OF FLAVORTOWN. His menus are full of foods that are rockin’, killer, fully-loaded, made of dragon’s breath, sporting lava from its culinary volcano. Many items are purposefully misspelled — “slyders” instead of “sliders,” “stix” instead of “sticks,” “unyawns” instead of just fucking “onions.” And of course he is famous for a thing actually called Donkey Sauce (recipe here) because I guess the sauce you milk from a donkey sounds appealing, somehow? I have never been particularly interested in consuming the byproduct of a donkey, not as a meal, not as a condiment, not even as the most meagerest of garnishes, and yet here we are in a world where Donkey Sauce exists as a think you can make or buy. (In the interest of fairness, if you’d like the origin story of the donkey sauce name — here it shall be.)

* * *

When I first beheld Guy Fieri — you do not see him so much as you witness him for the first time, the way you see an entity being born or the way you watch a car crash happen — I kinda hated him, because, ew, what the fuck. What am I looking at here? He seemed like a product, a creation of the same shadow council who makes new eXXXtreme Doritos flavors, like he’s a living mascot for a cartoon fast food restaurant that exists only in some satirical dystopia where people are food and donkeys are sauces. He has those vicious meringue tips atop his head, and that buttery pale pubic strip down his chin — that strip is bleached boldly blonde in a sea of dark beard, as if Guy one day saw some kind of food ghost and it scared him so bad that one Band-Aid-sized area of his face will forever remain fear-struck in ghastly white. That beard looks like you could squeeze it and from it you would get some mad hallucinogenic nectar that smells of peanut oil and shame.

He looks like a guy who eats suntan lotion. Just squirts it into his mouth, pbbt.

Then one day I watched the Triple-D, and I watched it in the way you mock-watch something, like, you watch it only for the snarkenfreude factor. You sit there, you make fun of it, you feel better about your life until you go to sleep and once again are haunted by your own nefarious inadequacy? Like that. Guy Fieri would go into these various professional kitchens or restaurant dining rooms and it was like seeing someone try to be funny –? He had the same riffs on the same jokes, the same comfort-food-variants of punchlines. Something-something Flavortown. Something something Taking A Ride On The Flavor Express. Something something Murdering Your Face With A Knife Made From Pure Flavor. He was a man on a program, a spam-bot made sentient, an advertising brand struck with lightning and crassly animated with life.

Over time, though, I stopped hate-watching it and started, well, watching it.

Just regular old watching it. Unironically! No snark in my heart.

If it was on and I wasn’t watching it — I flipped the channel to it. Willfully!

But snarky cynicism is my natural state and soon I felt compelled back to hating Fieri. I found things to despise anew about him. For instance, I hated how whenever he confronted an ingredient he didn’t like or understand he made these childish Mister Yuk-sticker faces like ew no I won’t eat that weird thing, yucky poopy doodoo, Mommy. And it was only emboldened by various COOL KIDS inside CULINARY HIGH SCHOOL sitting in the back of the class shitting on their clown-face teacher. Bourdain called Fieri’s NY restaurant a “terror-dome,” comparing it to Ed Hardy. He said of Fieri: “Did you ever see the Simpsons episode where it’s decided that Itchy and Scratchy need a sidekick? So a committee gets together and they invent one called Poochie.” Fieri feels as if with but a drunken twirl he can transform into Paula Deen in the snap of your butter-slick fingers. You try to hold in your head a world where Grant Achatz makes food like this, and Guy Fieri is rolling around in a hot tub full of chili and you have to spoon it out of his various divots and crevices and — you can’t. You can’t imagine that world. It is such cognitive dissonance that to try to maintain it will cause you to hemorrhage and fall down.

Then came the time someone hacked Guy Fieri’s menu online, with hilarious results.

Then came the NY Times review of Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar in NYC.

Choice quotes from that:

Did panic grip your soul as you stared into the whirling hypno wheel of the menu, where adjectives and nouns spin in a crazy vortex? When you saw the burger described as “Guy’s Pat LaFrieda custom blend, all-natural Creekstone Farm Black Angus beef patty, LTOP (lettuce, tomato, onion + pickle), SMC (super-melty-cheese) and a slathering of Donkey Sauce on garlic-buttered brioche,” did your mind touch the void for a minute?

and

Is the entire restaurant a very expensive piece of conceptual art? Is the shapeless, structureless baked alaska that droops and slumps and collapses while you eat it, or don’t eat it, supposed to be a representation in sugar and eggs of the experience of going insane?

and finally, a question that plagues us all, existentially:

Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?

It was cool to hate Guy Fieri.

And boy howdy, was it so fucking easy.

Look at this post I just wrote.

It’s joyous to savage someone so simply, so plainly, so completely. It becomes a powerful thing to hold up figures of what we deem to be icons of American Mediocrity and cut them to ribbons — Nickelback? Fuck you, Nickleback. I’m going to hate you and I’m going to let everyone know I hate you. Twilight? Eat shit, Twilight, you perfectly cromulent piece of vampire garbage. We roll around in our disdain like an animal covering ourselves in the scent of the cool kids, so they know we hate the same things they hate, so they can tell we’re not bought, we’re not sold, we’re not slathered in the drippings of weeks-old donkey sauce.

But I gotta tell you — I’ve turned the corner again on Guy Fieri.

This is what I’ve come to believe:

Guy Fieri is one of the more authentic presences we have. He’s not exactly funny. He’s totally affable. He doesn’t give a fuck what you think about his shitty hair. He has the gonzo balls to feed us something called donkey sauce without any of the self-reflection that the act would normally engender. This is not a man full of doubt. This is a man who loves food. He eats it with gastronomical gusto bordering on the grotesque, and he stitches that easy hammock smile between the two pillowy ranch-shellacked cheeks of his when he really likes something. You get the sense his fist-bumps are earnest as fuck. He likes these people. He likes food. He likes being on TV. He likes having restaurants and being Guy Fieri. He loves his family. He loves his work, his life, his little milk-white pubic pelt. He is who he is. I want to be that comfortable with myself. I want to be that authentic to who I am no matter who says boo about it.

So, I salute you, Guy Fieri. Never ever has there been a better example of someone embodying the phrase, you do you. You keep doing you, and we should all try to be ourselves so plainly, so boldly, so donkeysaucily. One day, Guy Fieri will diminish and go into the West and remain Guyfieriel, taking a ferry to Flavortown with the rest of the Dorito Elves. We will mourn his passing.

(And as an epilogue, Bourdain and Fieri seem to have squashed their culinary beef.)